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Afghanistan Is Doing Better Than You Think

By MICHAEL O'HANLON

March 23, 2014

KABUL—In the minds of most Americans—and perhaps most members of Congress, too—the war in Afghanistan is already long since lost. Spasms of violence like Thursday’s attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul, a popular haunt for Western expatriates, only seem to underscore the country’s ongoing fragility after more than 12 years of frustrating, grinding conflict. And periodic anti-American eruptions from Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s often difficult president, have made it harder still to persuade the U.S. public that things here are better than they seem from afar.

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The bottom line is this: There are some areas of particular concern in Afghanistan—no question. I’ve just spent a week there, on a trip sponsored by the U.S. military, after many previous such trips in the past, and it’s still very much a land at war. But the overall military picture is fairly good. Afghan forces now constitute 85 percent of all coalition forces, lead 95 percent of all operations and take more than 95 percent of all coalition casualties, according to U.S. and NATO figures—yet the enemy is not gaining momentum. And as Afghans prepare to go to the polls to elect Karzai’s successor in coming weeks, and as a new fighting season begins, with NATO forces two-thirds of the way through their drawdown, Afghanistan is doing far better than most critics imagine. A clockwise sweep of the country, starting with Kabul in the country’s central/eastern region, shows why.

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Kabul: The Afghan capital, far and away its largest city, is safer than ever by most measures. Of course, not all is well. In addition to the Serena attack, a popular Lebanese restaurant was bombed this past winter and many expatriates killed; a Norwegian journalist was recently murdered in cold blood on a street by a fringe insurgent group. But for the local population, the danger posed by insurgents is not the major worry in their lives. Traffic is teeming; the city has never been barricaded the way Baghdad was; violence rates are down by roughly half over the last couple years. Most “spectacular” attacks that grab international media attention amount to a few insurgents firing a rocket-propelled grenade someplace or brutally murdering a few innocents before getting themselves killed by Afghan forces—as just happened at the Serena. These can be tragic, to be sure, but fears that the Taliban would be storming Kabul’s gates have proven overblown.

Jalalabad and the northeast: Going east from Kabul toward Peshawar, Pakistan, via the famous Khyber Pass, the situation is mixed. There were positive developments during the U.S.-led surge but criminality and some degree of Taliban activity have picked up a bit of late. In the mountainous zones of Kunar and Nuristan, small terrorist redoubts persist (though with no more than a few dozen estimated al Qaeda core fighters). This area bears watching over the 2014 military campaign, as the modestly negative trend line of 2013 will need to be checked, given the importance of Jalalabad and the main road to the nation’s economy.

Khost and the southeast: This area is holding fairly steady. It is still violent, still plagued by the operations of the Haqqani network operating from bases just across the border in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan. Khost and its surroundings have never been cleared of insurgents as thoroughly as parts of the south have been, due to a smaller density of coalition forces during the surge of 2010-2012. But Afghan forces have built up layered defenses from Khost toward Kabul, and the ring road going from Kabul to Kandahar through this region as well as the major regional road to Khost are generally usable.